Friction Monitor
This feature is in Early Access. During this time, aspects of the functionality may still be developed, and this documentation may not always be up to date. If you have any questions, contact Amplitude Support.
Friction Monitor finds the user experience problems that hurt your product most, ranks them by impact, and routes each one to the team that owns it. It detects friction signals that Amplitude captures during real user sessions, groups matching signals into distinct issues, and links the session replays where each issue happened. Product managers, UX teams, and engineers use Friction Monitor to move from a flood of individual friction signals to a short, prioritized list of problems worth fixing.
Use Friction Monitor when you want a ranked, cross-session view of which UX problems to prioritize. If you want to inspect friction signals within a single user's session, watch the session replay directly instead.Closed beta
Friction Monitor ships as an internal release and closed beta under Experience Analytics > Friction Monitor. Only eligible early-access accounts have access. Contact your Amplitude account team to request access.
How Friction Monitor works
Friction Monitor turns raw friction signals into a ranked list of issues you can act on. It works in a few stages:
- Detect and fingerprint signals: Friction Monitor reads Autocapture data to detect friction signals, then fingerprints each one so it can recognize the same problem across many sessions.
- Group signals into issues: It groups matching signals into distinct issues, so a single recurring problem shows up as one issue rather than thousands of separate events.
- Rank by impact: Amplitude scores each issue's impact and orders the list so the highest-impact issues surface first. Each assessment includes a short description, an impact score, and recommended actions.
- Link related replays: Each issue links to the session replays where it occurred, so you can watch the problem happen in context.
- Label and route: Amplitude generates a label for each issue and routes it automatically to the relevant team or owner.
What Friction Monitor detects
In this release, Friction Monitor detects two types of friction signal:
- Dead clicks: Clicks on elements that appear interactive but do nothing, such as a non-interactive image styled like a button or a link that leads nowhere.
- Error clicks: Clicks that coincide with an error in the session, which often point to a broken or failing interaction.
Amplitude captures these signals through Autocapture, so you don't need to instrument them manually.
How Amplitude ranks and routes issues
Friction Monitor prioritizes issues by impact and helps you get each one in front of the right people:
- Impact ranking: Amplitude ranks issues by their estimated impact so your team can focus on the problems that matter most.
- AI labels and automatic routing: Amplitude generates a label for each issue and routes it to the team or owner responsible for that part of the product.
- Slack notifications: Friction Monitor sends notifications to Slack so teams learn about new or high-impact issues without checking the dashboard.
- Linear integration: You can connect issues to Linear to track fixes in your existing workflow.
- MCP tools: Friction Monitor exposes MCP tools so you can query issues by team, owner, and impact from an AI assistant.
Prerequisites
To use Friction Monitor, your account needs:
- Access to the Friction Monitor closed beta. Eligibility applies.
- Amplitude AI features enabled.
- Autocapture enabled, with enough event volume for Amplitude to detect and group friction signals.
Where to find Friction Monitor
Find Friction Monitor in Amplitude under Experience Analytics > Friction Monitor. The list view shows your ranked issues, and selecting an issue opens its detail view with the impact assessment and linked replays.
Coming soon
Amplitude is expanding Friction Monitor beyond click-based signals. Planned capabilities include a pipeline that analyzes captured replays more broadly, additional friction types, anomaly detection, and revenue and business-impact analysis. These aren't available yet.
Limitations
Friction Monitor detects dead clicks and error clicks in this release. It relies on Autocapture data, so it can't detect friction on interactions that Autocapture doesn't capture. Issue detection and grouping depend on having enough event volume.
Was this helpful?